Hollywood Giving Up On Bad Movie URLs, Telling Fans To Google It (GOOG)

For Hollywood, getting people to a movie promo website can be tricky. The problem: Almost anything a screenwriter comes up with for a title is bound to have already been used for someone's dot-com domain. So if you want people to see the website for "Fanboys," you may have to hope people will navigate to a terrible URL like http://www.fanboys-themovie.com/.

But Sony (SNE) has come up with a clever tactic: Just telling people to use Google (GOOG). Check out how Sony directs people to the website for upcoming aliens-and-armageddon movie "2012" (located at the awful URL http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/2012/ ).

On our search, Sony's website for 2012 is the second search result. The first result is the Wikipedia entry for the year 2012, but even that's a Sony win:

Of course, there's the not-insignificant problem of how to get a high page ranking in Google before telling people to Google search for your movie. Other (presumably older) versions of the 2012 trailer on Youtube omit the "Google Search 2012" pointer.